GPU+GPU is faster in theory because some tiles are rendered (slower) by the CPU and so, GPU will have less tiles to render in order to complete the task. But most of the times the last tiles to be rendered are taken by CPU, so they render slower, and it can happen that these last tiles take such time to finish that all the advantage is lost, and goes negative, resulting in an overall slower render

Interesting. If you can give me the driver version that gave the best times, that may help other user of the 9xx series. Luckily on Windows, it’s pretty easy to roll-back to the previous version in the hardware manager.

Sorry, I was wrong it is still possible.
If you open Blender and start rendering it is always slower than if you render it the second time.
The render time with the RTX version is indeed only a tiny bit slower than the old build (~1min).
I’ve also fixed the Crashes for the RTX version with your registry trick.
Sorry for the confusion

everything ok So the RTX version on 980 takes 26minute instead of 25 (about 4% slower) right?
I also have a bug in 2.8. Sometime it spends a very long time (about 1 minute) on the synchronization/shader compile phase. It’s already reported on the bug tracker. But E-Cycles+ this bug is faster than 2.79 so

I had the opportunity to test E-Cycles on a freshly packed scene, to have a margin of comparison.
I must admit that the results are amazing.Here the Thread.
The main scene, calculated at 2500 samples, 2400px, previously used almost 3 hours for the calculation.
With E-Cycles we are at 1h 20 … Less than half.

Obviously in terms of performance I believe the data speak for themselves.
On 8 images, 2h one I lost a day of calculation.
With E-Cycles, in just over 2 hours I solved everything.
Surely, by making some improvements to the settings, I could gain more time.
Calculations made with a “simple” pc i7-7700 + gtx1080.

This is so frustrating, i’m desperately wanting to run E-Cycles to render my animation files that have fire sims in them but it seems this is a problem w/ 2.8? AS per my link above, i’ve been trying to get it to work but even baking the sim in 2.8 messes up, the fire renders but the flames are mis-placed
given i have 6 or 7 shots involving fire, and they’re doing about 65m a frame on 2.79…this sucks.

I could add a 2.79 build as an extra product with year membership (same price as for 2.8). People who already have a paid year membership for 2.8 could get it for free.
Everyone interested can add a like to this post.

That would be very generous, and i think it would be a very good move, given 2.8 is still some time away, and there are doubtless quite a few people who will be sticking w/ 2.79 for some time for whatever their reasons.
thank you.

Hm, how its possible to take a FREE code of someone else (original Cycles), tweak it and sell it for money??? Original author(s) spent years to build it and give us all their work for free… Its like takeing some free textures from the web and sell them for money because of tweaking the contrast or resize or some…

@wolfie138: To render Your anim use SheepIt renderfarm - its FREE and FAST as hell!

I don’t think this is the right way to look at E-Cycles. With this logic all developers that create addons for Blender should not be allowed to charge any money because is build on top of Blender which is develop with FREE code.

Think of E-Cycles like a paid addon to Cycles. Bliblubli has spent many months or year developing and testing new algorithms to improve the performance in Cycles.

He is also offering weekly custom builds with this new features, up to 2x Cycles performance and support. It is not unreasonable for him to monetize his efforts so he can continue this work. All of us need to make a living.

If you don’t see the value of E-Cycles or for that matter any of the available paid addons to Blender no need to buy it.

Many of us who have purchase E-Cycles and enjoy much faster Cycles rendering now are happy to have it available. I for one have no interest in working with a render farm. Bliblubli has said that he will make all this improvements available to Blender in one year so everyone can benefit.

Oh you use Cycles for free, so you never funded anything, although you found enough money to buy a computer that runs cycles. You benefit from other giving 27 000 $/month. And you download it for free also and bandwidth cost a lot. So you actually take money from others without giving back.
And you take time to judge other, without taking the time to know their background. When you will have contributed over more than 3 years code to Blender and do free support on your week ends and try to live from donations, you can speak. Until that day, I wish you to live in a world only made of people who judge other and live from others efforts without doing any themselves, like you.
By the way, leave that community, people are all bad here and even when spending time to help you, they don’t manage to solve YOUR problem Restricted Glow in Compositor … Bad, bad community

Yeah it is possible since a lot of addons here are paid, because guess what it takes a lot of time to actually do them and in case you didn’t notice a lot of those addons are extremely useful and save your time (ergo money if you use blender to earn money). Althou I prefer “one time payment for unlimited use” model (higher price) I really understand this subscription style everybody is doing now (it is actually healthier for developers and helps them to keep their head above the water). Do you realize that Cycles is quite slow in compare with other render engines right? This enhancement is quite something and the price is reasonable. And as bonus there is a chance that these improvements might get in the vanilla build(FREE) in the future.